11/27/16

Child Care - Homelessness and Immigration

Post election, we are all wondering about immediate deportation and the erection of walls. In the meantime, a recent headline in the Texas Observer went beyond our call for affortable, safe and educational child care:

Child Careless - Texas doesn't want to take migrant children out of prison-like detention centers, so it found a way to classify the facilities as child care outfits.

Highlights from the article:

Licensing detention centers as child care facilities in order to circumvent rules banning the government from locking up kids and babies in cells. These places aren’t technically prisons; they’re just run by private prison contractors. You can’t just walk in, and the people inside sure as hell can’t just walk out. Just like in a jail or prison, journalists have to get permission to go inside, where they’re likely to be tailed by officials and flacks.Over the last year and a half, according to the Austin American-Statesman, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recommended docking the prison contractors hundreds of thousands of dollars for various violations inside these facilities. Stuff most parents probably wouldn’t cotton to in a day care. Think “nonfunctioning security cameras,” “running out of baby formula” and “unsanitary food service.”Compliance with basic standards seems particularly important in light of the history of abuse and mistreatment at the T. Don Hutto facility, where officials stopped housing kids back in 2009 after human rights advocates took them to task over prison-like conditions.And yet Texas health officials have announced plans to license these kinds of places as child care centers, because doing so will let the authorities skirt judicial rulings that prevent law enforcement from throwing kids in unlicensed facilities willy-nilly, seeing as how it’s sort of, you know, un-American to throw abused children in prisons.